Grounding Expectations Activity - PiLa-CS

This document shares an activity and template for an activity that our research practice partnership, Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS), created to clarify values, and hash out norms and expectations between the teachers and researchers taking part in the project. We hoped this activity would help us acknowledge some of the power dynamics that could threaten equity in our partnership. We also hoped to build trust and establish open lines of communication. We drew inspiration from tools available at the Research + Practice Collaboratory such as Ryoo et al (2015)’s tool, How to Build Equitable Research-Practice Partnerships.

As our RPP grew, added new members, and changed form over the years, we came to realize that the roles of “researchers” and “educators” necessarily blur in an RPP (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). For this, we developed other structures for checking in with and co-constructing the norms of our project. But this tool served as a strong point of departure, and way for researchers to articulate our values at the start of our project. We re-visited and revised this document two subsequent times during end-of-school year summer institutes with teachers.